Doing My Best… a Web Developers Blog

Make an Impact

Recently, it has come to my attention that not all developers have the ability to make an impact.

But that begs the question, what does making an impact mean?

Making an impact.

It's coming out the door - swinging. So much of a developers role, especially in a start up, is determined by their first 3 days. Day 1, yes, come in, settle down, welcome aboard. Day 2, start asking all of the questions you had from day 1, and for heavens sake, do something besides look busy.

Day 3, you better have your shit together, and you should be swinging for the fences.

Don't ask for something to do, demand a project. And while you're doing, don't ask questions the very second you think you don't know something.

Look for the answer first.

It's this mentality that I find so damn frustrating - all of the answers should be in the code base. Run a damn grep on your project base, and find an answer. There's no excuse for any mid, to upper mid level programmer to be asking stupid questions. By stupid question, I'm refering to in the inabilty to traverse the code base in search of functions, methods, answers.

Make an impact, 3 days.

Tags: impact, rant, Tips

Modrewrite and Short Urls – What you really want to know.

I recently opened up an old .htaccess and I was struck with the memory of how much it sucked trying to Google search for some real, working, answers on making short urls.

So here you go, my quick tip on what you really want to know about mod_rewrite.

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Tags: apache, mod rewrite, seo, Web Development

Professional PHP

It's important to remember what sets a professional PHP developer apart from the pack that floods your average help channel.

Too often I run into reviewing or helping a "professional" developer, and I can't help but mutter "you're doing it wrong..."

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Tags: PHP, Software Development, Tips, Web Development

PHP & MySQL Tip #2 – Better Way of Pagination

I've seen this come up a few times in #php on irc.gamesurge.net - how to find the total number of rows found, while using the LIMIT clause on a query.

I've seen people respond with some seriously incorrect solutions, such as 'Simply load all of the results into an array and only show X amount' or 'Simple run another query without the LIMIT clause and count those rows.'

Those two, common, solutions are sadly not the best solution.

Read on to discover my solution.

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Tags: MySQL, PHP, Tips

Problem Solving – guide to PHP programming and debugging.

Problem solving forms part of thinking.

Interesting... so, if so many web devs and IT personnel have such a problem with problem solving, perhaps they're just not thinking? Let's explore some of the problems I've seen people encounter, and how I was baffled they lacked the problem solving skills to complete their tasks.

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